Global Economic History
Why are some countries rich and others poor? In 1500, global income differences were small, but disparities have grown dramatically since Columbus reached America. In this Very Short Introduction, Robert C. Allen shows how the interplay of geography, globalization, technological change, and economic policy has determined the wealth and poverty of nations. Allen shows how the industrial revolution was Britain's path-breaking response to the challenge of globalization. Western Europe and North America joined Britain to form a club of rich nations, pursuing four policies--creating a national market by abolishing internal tariffs and investing in transportation, erecting an external tariff to protect their fledgling industries from British competition, creating banks to stabilize the currency and mobilize domestic savings for investment, and promoting mass education to prepare people for industrial work. Together these countries pioneered new technologies that have made them ever richer. A few countries--Japan, Soviet Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, and perhaps China--have caught up with the West through creative responses to the technological challenge and with Big Push industrialization that has achieved rapid growth through coordinated investment. -- Book Description.
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What Hacker News says
- Some ideas from scanning Amazon and looking through HN:
- A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World
- This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
- Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
- Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction
- Cities of Commerce: The Institutional Foundations of International Trade in the Low Countries, 1250-1650
- The Roman Market Economy
- Economic history: What can we learn from the Depression? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6715879
- A history of American economic growth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=727172
- Economic history ignored leads to the inevitable https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2955219
- (Review) A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=298446
Working link at: http://www.cis.org.au/images/stories/policy-magazine/2008-wi...
- The Economic History of the Last 2,000 Years in 1 Little Graph https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135400
- Non-fiction I read this year:
Michael Benson - Space Odyssey - The detailed story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If you're a fan of the movie, or of Stanley Kubrick and/or Arthur C. Clarke in general, you should read this.
Atul Gawande - Complications - Fascinating look at life in the medical profession.
Christina Thompson - Sea People - Detailed, well-researched history of Polynesian-Western contact and relations. As a New Zealander I was interested in this, although American or European readers with no personal connection may be less so.
Peter Singer - Marx: A Very Short Introduction - What it says on the tin.
Robert C Allen - Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction - Also good, but inaccurately titled; it should have said "Global Economic History Since the Industrial Revolution".
Fraser A Sherman - Now and Then We Time Travel - A thorough if somewhat superficial survey of time travel in the movies.
Alec Nevala-Lee - Astounding - A history of the magazine Astounding Stories, and the four men most closely associated with it: John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Ron Hubbard. Very thoroughly researched and annotated; it reveals a lot of new information and debunks a lot of old myths. (Whichever version of the "FBI visits Campbell to complain about A-bomb stories" you've heard, I can pretty much guarantee it wasn't the real one.)
Elizabeth Sandifer - Tardis Eruditorum 1: William Hartnell - The first volume of a thorough study of Doctor Who, with a combined fannish and scholarly point of view that I enjoyed.
Randall Munroe - How To - It's by Randall Munroe, what else do you need to know?
